Nasty and deluded, Labour is fighting a phantom menace

‘Johnson has successfully defined a new centre ground’

- Patrick O’Flynn

ACCORDING to many Left-wingers, our country is in the grip of the most Right-wing regime in living memory, headed by a British version of Donald Trump.

Or, as Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner, put it: “We cannot get any worse than a bunch of scum, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, an absolute pile of banana republic, vile, nasty, Etonian, posh piece of scum.”

Ms. Rayner has mercifully now apologized for that horrible, semi-literate outburst, but one wonders whether she possesses the intellectual firepower to understand that in fact her assessment of the Tories under Boris Johnson as being extreme was so wide of the mark as to fail a test of basic credibility.

For the truth of it is that far from being what the previous US President approvingly dubbed “Britain Trump”, Johnson has successfully defined a new center ground. And while his personal style may get up the noses of Leftists, many of his actual policies are these days more likely to irritate Right-wingers.

A man who once described himself as “a kind of Brexity Heseltine” is living up to that moniker by ploughing tens of billions of pounds extra into public infrastructure schemes designed to rejuvenate “left behind” towns and districts as part of his levelling-up agenda.